It has now been six months since I moved into a new workshop but it is still a work in progress as I move furniture around and make upgrades and changes to the layout, tools and accessories! The move itself, although exhausting, was relatively straight forward and gave me a somewhat blank canvas-type opportunity to consider how I wanted my new workshop to be laid out.
I spent a great deal of time packing everything up into boxes at the old house to make sure all my tools would be transported safely and that all the sharp blades and hazards were sufficiently considered to avoid anyone getting hurt. I also went through all of my scrap wood and did a major sort, getting rid of a whole load of small off-cuts which I’d been keeping for several years but never actually doing anything with!
As I’ve developed and improved my workshop, I have added casters to more and more of the shop furniture and tools. This has made it so much easier to move things around to improve my workflow or to change the workshop setup to accommodate different types of projects: some things I’ve made have needed a lot more space than others, such as the trunk I made for my Dad, the various benches (Bench #1, Bench #2 and Bench #3), the lockdown desk, and the keyboard stand, compared to the much smaller projects including the cat phone holder, the whale doorstop, the award holders and the Christmas tree tealight candle holders!
As the van was unloaded, I made sure everything was positioned in a semi-usable place to start with. The house is quite a bit smaller than the previous house, so parts of the garage workshop ended up quite full of a lot of temporarily stored things for the first couple of months as boxes in the house and garden were unpacked and sorted.
After I built and sorted out some new outdoor storage for the gardening tools and equipment (blog post coming soon!), I managed to free up a lot of space at the front of the garage, which gave me room to start sorting and unpacking lots of my woodworking tools and equipment. The general layout of the shop furniture hasn’t really changed much in the past 6 months from this first version, but I have lots of ideas for how to continue to improve the workshop and increase how easy it is to access and use everything within the space I have available in my new workshop. I don’t think a workshop is ever truly finished, as there will always be things to alter or tweak upon gaining a new tool or starting a new project needing a different amount of space. I will continue to share my progress and experiences here as my new workshop takes shape and I make more projects in the new space! 🔨
The Woodworking Scientist 